The Return of John X

In Antwerp's old Grand' Place one day last week, the U.S. Army held a solemn ceremony. It was to have been almost wholly American, but the people of Antwerp would not have it that way. Throughout the city, they draped their windows with U.S. flags. To the Grand' Place came more than 5,000 Belgians, many of them bearing chrysanthemums and laurel. For Antwerp, whose citizens had called it "the city of sudden death" during the long rain of German V-bombs, this was a day to say thanks and farewell.

In the center of the square was a flower-covered casket, in it the body of "John X," a G.I. fallen in defense of Belgium (he was not an unknown soldier; for this occasion one body was designated as John X). Joseph Cardinal van Roey, primate of Belgium, said a blessing for John X, then the bells of the ancient Notre Dame Cathedral tolled. Hundreds of Belgians fell in behind the procession as a caisson bore the casket to a pier on the Scheldt. There the casket of John X joined 5,599 others in the hold of the U.S. Army transport Joseph V. Connolly, strung with flowers from bow to stern. While U.S. Thunderbolts from Germany dipped aloft, the Connolly steamed down the Scheldt, its banks lined with thousands of silent Belgians.

Thus began the homeward journey from Europe of the U.S. dead of World War II. The bodies of the 5,599 men and one woman (an Army nurse) were to be repatriated to each of the 48 states. Mostly they were the fallen of the Aachen campaign and the Battle of the Bulge.

Until their exhumation, the bodies had lain in the Henri-Chappelle cemetery near Liege.

To San Francisco this week would come the vanguard of the dead from the Pacific: 2,992 from Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Peleliu and Iwo Jima.* From Africa in a few weeks would begin another funeral procession. Soon every U.S. city and town, almost every crossroads hamlet, would have a fresh reminder of the price of peace.

*The 2,992 bodies aboard the U.S.S. Honda Knot would not be the first to arrive in the U.S. Early in the war, through an error, the bodies of two U.S. marines were returned to their kin in St. Louis (TIME, June 22, 1942)

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